A look at metadata processing beyond Libraries

Abstract

Since many years libraries, archives and museums, the institutions entrusted with the dissemination and conservation of cultural heritage, contributed to metada standards definition, meta-dating methodologies and metadata representation in different syntaxes, by partecipating to national projects and international initiatives. Management systems and catalogs used in these contexts borrow from information and telecommunication technology tools, metodoligies and techniques to generate, organize, share and use various types of metadata. But the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) area is not only a supplier of technological tools and solutions as it also constitutes a rich basin in which metadata plays a fundamental role in designing architectures, modeling information systems and implementing services. Through an overview that includes national and European initiatives, especially in the digital transformation process of the public sector, this paper aims to offer a look to metadata beyond the traditional boundary of libraries and other cultural institutions and to underline some relevant aspects such as standardization, sharing, reuse and metadata quality assessment. This framework highlights the need to carry on with the path of cooperation between different functional domains and organizational contexts in order to consolidate and extend the (re)use of metadata schemes, ontologies and controlled vocabularies both in the redesign of digitized processes and in the implementation of services supporting them. By undertaking since design early stages a multidisciplinary approach based on metadata standards can ensure greater flexibility and higher interoperability. This vision requires the enhancement of intersectorial skills that meld metadata methodologies and syntaxes representation basic knowledge with the ability to model functional domains using metadata schemes and ontologies.